If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Do you eat meat?

I haven't eaten meat for over 3 years now. I'm trying to understand how people who eat meat justify their decision. Since I usually hear nothing but stupid cliches and one liners when people try to argue this subject, I'm going to have to request that people refrain from doing that in this thread. I don't care if you think vegetarians are pretentious or anything beside the point like that, just explain in an intelligent way why you personally think it's okay to eat meat.

I eat meat because I love the taste of dead, bloody animal in my mouth.

Also, I think it's an important part of food. It's unnatural to me not to eat meat. We have the teeth for it and we have the organs that process it. People have always eaten meat, replacing it with plants isn't that logical. Meat also played an important role in human-evolution, so why break that chain? Sure, I don't always agree on how the food-production works, but I can't do much about that. I don't buy any battery caged products though, that's just cruel. I much rather pay a bit more.

i used to be a vegetarian for a while. i think the meat industry is absolutely repulsive (i prefer my food without a side of torture, thanks) i felt better (physically) not eating meat, and since i feel kinda shitty about swatting mosquitoes, using my money to support the slaughter of fuzzy things is a rather upsetting thought.

that being said, i quit a while ago. my husband had to cut out carbs almost entirely, and if you leave out carbs and meat, there's not a whole lot of tasty stuff left to eat. amirite? so we went back to eating dead stuff, and don't get me wrong, it is delicious. but i miss the sort of "light" feeling i had when i was a vegetarian. it definitely feels healthier.

i try to only purchase organic/free range/cage free meat products because 1) the quality is much higher and 2) at least my money goes to farms which make an effort to be humane.

i think claiming that being a vegetarian is "unnatural" is pretty ridiculous, considering the level of artifice that surrounds us (and that we ingest) consider the amount of overprocessed shit, preservatives and food coloring you consume daily, and then get back to me on the whole "natural order" bullshit.

I was vegetarian for six years, until last March. I just realized that I no longer cared about not eating meat. So I would say that the most compelling argument for eating meat is "because someone wants to," and the most compelling argument for not eating meat is "because someone doesn't want to." Even when I was veggie, it wasn't an ethical issue, and I have a hard time with people who turn it into a moral crusade.

My bandmate wrote a book called The Shameless Carnivore in which he details his manifesto of meat eating--that people should recognize and respect that their food had a face, and not eat at shameful industrialized places like McDonalds. He respects vegetarians because many of them have recognized this and therefore choose not to eat meat. What he is against is people who like their meat all processed and stripped of everything so it doesn't look like that which it once was, i.e. McD's burger patties made from 250 different cows. It's a good narrative of a meat-eater, and, full disclosure, I appear in several narrative episodes (as "Vegetarian Sarah").

Ok? How? I mean, it's really no secret that it's very common to hear stupid bullshit about how it's wussy or stupid to not eat meat, right? So I just pointed out that I didn't want to hear any of that. I wasn't trying to say that most people who eat meat have stupid arguments.

You're coming off as someone who looks down on people who eat meat and want them to justify why they do something that they just do. You could have said "I stopped eating meat three years ago and I'm curious why others choose to eat meat," instead of using judgmental language like "justify" and being defensive from the outset about your being a vegetarian.